It is notoriously difficult to write a history of those whose professional lives unfolded mainly behind closed doors, in the private spaces of bourgeois apartments, especially when these subjects leave few personal documents. Ambika Natarajan has done a remarkable job of overcoming these challenges to explore the world of household servants during the last century of Habsburg rule. Servants of Culture: Paternalism, Policing and Identity Politics in Vienna, 1700–1914 is a rollicking story of middle-class anxiety and clever serving girls, sex traffickers, and outwitted police, reformers who attempted to “regulate” domestic employment, and a Viennese reading public eagerly consuming tales of rape, abduction, and murder. Natarajan traces the tensions surrounding servant reform efforts to depict imperial dysfunction and fin de siècle social conflict. The plot unfolds around several interlocking themes. We learn of the influx of migrants from the countryside to the capital after serfdom laws loosened ties to the land. Uneasy about the lack of regulation over itinerant laborers who emerged as “a frightening specter for the bourgeoisie,” the 1810 Josephine Codes eliminated local and church responsibility for itineracy and instead imposed imperial police regulation over servants through identification papers and employment books. But these vague imperial laws left substantial power in the hands of household masters, who continued to bear responsibility for the morality of their maids and discouraged police from intervening in cases of abuse.

At the core of Natarajan’s intervention lies the overlap between the world of domestic service and that of commercial sex. Independent-minded servants intent on making their own employment decisions caught the popular imagination, and their stories soon blended with anxiety over the perils of prostitution, especially after the introduction of police-regulated sex work in 1873. Here the “danger” of innocent young maids trafficked to brothels bleeds over into antisemitic concerns about Jewish procurers and corrupt placement agencies. All of this was driven by a burgeoning penny press that published sensational stories to drive up readership. As populist parties and aid agencies sought to reform the conditions of domestic labor, they continued to base their proposals on paternalistic notions of “protection” and “guidance” for gullible young women, attitudes that denied the agency and restricted the choices of those engaged in service. For Natarajan, it is important that the turn to paid sex was often a conscious decision for erstwhile maids. She also demonstrates resistance to employers in the form of violence, theft, and other “weapons of the weak.” Few of the women in her story are as naive and gullible as the servant class was often portrayed, though in truth many of her examples reveal instances of trickery and false promises that suggest the female “victims” were not always fully informed of their fate.

The through line in the presentation is Natarajan’s notion of the “continuity of culture” in Habsburg history. She stresses the importance of an outdated and untenable paternalistic concept that stymied genuine servant reform, and put power in the hands of bourgeois masters and imperial police while denying lower-class women the ability to make determinations about their bodies and their labor. Modernity, she suggests, brought questions about individual autonomy that challenged a lingering obsession with paternalistic practices. Natarajan uses tensions between the memory of older cultural norms and the rising autonomy of unskilled, propertyless employees to highlight the dysfunction at the core of the late empire. “The story of the maidservant in Vienna,” she proposes, “is the story of the Habsburg Empire and its subsequent collapse” (12).

Certainly, clashing norms characterized fin de siècle Viennese life, but few historians would argue they were unique to the empire. Rather, the story of recalcitrant serving girls, abusive bourgeois employers, and increasing police surveillance is a familiar one. Across Central Europe and beyond, servants and other unskilled women crossed the line into paid sex, whether it was casual exchanges with delivery boys, intermittent encounters during periods of unemployment, or a semi-permanent pivot from domestic service to prostitution. Antisemitism was wielded as an instrument of the sensationalizing press and upstart political parties, capturing the imaginations of downtrodden citizens at all levels of society. Reform-minded governments and charitable associations sought to control rather than liberate the independent young women working in their homes and on city streets. Meanwhile, governments enhanced their surveillance capabilities, tightened border controls, and increased regulation of female bodies. Austria was not the only state at the fin de siècle to face social tensions between female autonomy and paternalistic moral codes. It just happened to be an empire that was about to crumble. Overall, Servants of Culture is a rich and complex study of urban–rural entanglements, female enfranchisement, and lower-class agency, demonstrating both the impediments facing unskilled women workers and the resilience of their efforts to capitalize on cracks in the armor of imperial control.